While cultural anxieties about fatness and stigmatisation of fat bodies in Western cultures have been central to dominant discourses about bodily ‘propriety’ since the early twentieth century, the rise of the ‘disease’ category of ‘obesity’ and the moral panic over an alleged global ‘obesity epidemic’ has lent a medical authority and legitimacy to what can be described as ‘fat-phobia’. Against the backdrop of the ever-growing medicalisation and pathologisation of fatness, the field of Fat Studies has emerged in recent years to offer an interdisciplinary critical interrogation of the dominant medical models of health, to give voice to the lived experience of fat bodies, and to offer critical insights into, and investigations of, the ethico-political implications of the cultural meanings that have come to be attached to fat bodies.

This Special Issue will examine a range of questions concerning the construction of fat bodies in the dominant imaginary, including the problematic intersection of medical discourse and morality around ‘obesity’, disciplinary technologies of ‘health’ to normalise fat bodies (such as diet regimes, exercise programs and bariatric surgeries), gendered aspects of ‘fat’, dominant discourses of ‘fatness’ in a range of cultural contexts, and critical strategies for political resistance to pervasive ‘fat-phobic’ attitudes.

This Special Issue of Feminism & Psychology will showcase critical fat scholarship from around the globe by gathering together research from across a spectrum of disciplinary backgrounds (such as Cultural Studies, Fat Studies, Critical Psychology, Philosophy, Sociology, Human/Cultural Geography, Public Health, etc) as well as activists and health care professionals. The Special Issue seeks to begin a critical conversation about the productive and enabling critical possibilities Fat Studies offers for rethinking dominant notions about health and pathology, gender and bodily aesthetics, political interventions, and beyond.

Papers are sought that engage with topics such as (but not limited to):

Contributions will be expected to orient themselves to the core aims and mission of Feminism & Psychology, which is concerned with publishing work that fosters the development of feminist theory and practice in Â­ and beyond Â­ psychology, and that provides insights into the gendered reality of everyday lives.

The Special Issue will consist of papers in of the following formats:

Papers between 5-Â­ 6000 words in length;

Observation/Commentary-style papers Â­ up Â to 2500 words in length

Please note that all word counts include reference lists.

Contributions will be selected following an anonymous peer review process.

I haven’t posted anything here in a while.Â Partly that’s down to plain old busy-ness.Â Partly – and probably a more significant part – is that I’m grappling with the fact that this tiny little anonymous blog of mine is changing.Â Specifically, it’s becoming more and more identifiable with me and my academic pursuits.Â Which poses a problem for me re how to manage what has so far been an essentially-personal-if-somewhat-theoretically-inclined style of writing in light of possible recognition by colleagues and even future employers.Â On the one hand, I’m feeling that the essentially personal is now too personal.Â On the other, I think the personal is absolutely central to the (or at least my) project of fat studies.Â It is quite blatantly because I live a fat body that I am doing this work, that I am interested in this research, these conversations, these experiences.Â My academic pursuits are about my body; they could not be more personal.Â My thesis research is directly motivated by my experiences of sexuality as a fat subject; it could not be more intimate.Â The reality of this is blatantly apparent every time I stand in front of an audience and give a paper, and as much as academic language can provide a sort of distance, the material fact of my body refuses any attempt to hide.

I think the personal is important, is a real a proper subject of inquiry.Â I think auto-ethnography can be a wonderfully illuminating methodology (see Sam Murray’s work for an example of just how brilliant and important it can be).Â I’m not doing auto-ethnographic research for my thesis (though in many ways, I might as well be), but I do use this blog to connect my personal experiences with theory (though not always explicitly, and not always successfully).

There’s a wonderful quote I came across in an undergrad creative writing class, which sums up what I’m trying to say:

All of which is to preface another essentially personal entry that I’ve had a hard time coming to write.

Two weeks ago, The Socialist and I headed up to Brisbane.Â The impetus for the trip was to see the Queensland Theatre Company’s production of Neil LaBute’s Fat Pig, which I’m thesising about.Â I also had the pleasure of (briefly) meeting Natalie, Nick, Sonya, Janey, and Zoe, who just happened to be going to the same performance.Â You can read Natalie’s thoughts about the play here.

[I’m going to warn for spoilers, even though the production run has finished now.]

I saw another production of Fat Pig by the Sydney Theatre Company back in 2006, and it was a markedly different production, which leads me to a slightly different reading of the production.Â I think Natalie makes some excellent points, particularly that, this production especially, is essentially “a story about how terribly hard it is for hetero men to select partners and play mates alike when there are only thin, shrieking women and fat pigs on offer”.Â As Natalie says,Â Jeanie is a horrible caricature of all the worst traits misogynist culture assigns to women – she’s shrill, shallow, posey, emotionally unstable, insecure, needy, obsessed with finding a husband, manipulative, aggressive but essentially powerless, uses her physical beauty to get what she wants . . . she’s a walking stereotype.Â Jeanie’s opposite, Helen (the eponymous ‘fat pig’) is much more appealing – she’s funny, smart, self-deprecating, and genuine.Â She’s probably the only likeable character in the play.Â A generous interpretation of the direction might assume that playing Jeanie as hyper-shrill and completely obnoxious was an attempt to show Helen as even more sympathetic, and more desirable.Â For me, though, it was simply shrieking misogyny.Â It leaves no options for women – you can either be a lovely person but a fat pig who will end up alone; or you can be a shrill bitch but beautiful, and end up with an equally obnoxious and shallow male counterpart (Carter).

To be fair, the men fare little better.Â Tom, the supposed ‘nice guy’, is an emotional coward.Â The play’s central conflict is his inability to be honest with his friends (‘friends’), his paralysing fear of judgement.Â He won’t admit to being with Helen because he fears being mocked and ridiculed – and when Tom and Helen are outed as a couple, that’s exactly what happens.Â He won’t tell Jeanie honestly and straight-forwardly that he doesn’t want to see her anymore.Â He won’t tell Carter that he doesn’t really like him or want him around.Â It’s telling that all Tom’s ‘friends’ are actually workmates.Â It’s telling that he doesn’t really enjoy their company, but that he is nonetheless completely beholden to their opinions.Â The play doesn’t leave any options for men, either – you can either be a complete, unapologetic douchebag, and end up with a shrieking-but-skinny girlfriend; or you can try to be genuine and find something that actually makes you happy, but be unable to bear the judgement and end up alone.

The STC production was a lot more subtle.Â It was still the same story, of course, and the same bleak ending (it’s Neil LaBute, after all).Â But Carter was not quite so purely douchey, and Jeanie was actually relateable as a character.Â I won’t say likeable, or even sympathetic, but she was played in a way that made you understand that the culture at large manoeuvres women into just these sorts of roles.Â Helen (played by the divinely gorgeous Katrina Milosevic, who I once had the pleasure of serving when I worked at My Size and was completely smitten with her) was a slightly more subdued character.Â Tom was . . . still an emotional coward.

The QTC also made some interesting choices in the mis-en-scene, most specifically the inter-titles.Â Each scene in the play text is titled, and QTC chose to display these titles on a screen which provided the backdrop for the stage.Â The first title “That First Meeting With Her” was displayed in yellow, san serif text on a red background.Â Sound familiar?Â Yep, just like a McDonald’s ad.Â The title for “A Surprising Night Out Together” was a Japanese-inspired background, which made sense given they were at a Japanese restaurant.Â The decision to add the word ‘Sumo’ to the background (presumably to indicate the name of the restaurant), however, was entirely unnecessary, and confirms my sneaking suspicion that the production was trying to have it both ways – playing up (and even creating) fat jokes for cheap laughs*, at the same time as telling a story about the incredibly destructive effects of fat hatred.

And fat hatred is incredibly destructive.Â Unlike Natalie, I have dated people who’ve given in to societal pressure rather than admit they were attracted to a fat girl.Â My First Really Bad Relationship was kept secret because of the shame and disgust around fat sex.Â I saw the 2006 STC production with an ex-lover who had a declared preference for fat girls.Â After the show, he talked about how closeting sucks, how in the past he’d dated thinner girls than what he was really attracted to because of that social pressure.Â Â Hanne Blanke also has a great section on ‘the case of the closeted fat admirer’ in her excellent book Big Big Love.Â This shit is, unfortunately, real.Â And it’s really, really painful.

I saw the play this time with a current lover who was saddened and appalled by what happens.Â When we talked about it afterwards, he admitted that there was a time when he might have been more concerned about other people’s judgement about having a fat lover (although The Socialist is technically obese according to BMI, I wouldn’t exactly call him ‘fat’).Â I admit that I’m still concerned about other people’s judgements of who I’m with, not least because I have a culturally-conditioned fear of judgement along the lines ofÂ “Oh, she’s so fat, that’s the best she can do” (which is something the play talks about, too).

Official, scholarly research-y reasons aside, the trip to Brisbane was also a slightly early anniversary celebration for The Socialist and I.Â (Huh. Almost a year. And I thought this would just be brief fling.)Â We stayed in a fancy hotel with a view of the river and a pool and motherfucking king sized beds and a two-person bathtub and a tv in the goddamn bathroom and we got room service breakfast and played at being rich for the weekend.Â Hell yeah it was awesome.Â It’s also far beyond anything I could have afforded as a single traveller.Â It was more fun and more relaxing than most of the travel I’ve done previously, which has been almost exclusively travelling on my own.Â It brought home to me, once again, just how much privilege is involved in coupledom – not only in terms of finances, but also in terms of emotional resources.Â To not have to psych myself up to go out for dinner alone, to not have to deal with a stranger’s resentment at my hip encroaching on their plane seat, to not feel sad that I was there alone with all the attendant cultural baggage, was a huge relief.Â And that’s why the personal matters, because it tells me about the cultural, the theoretical, the political.

Still catching up!Â Second: Registration is open for the fat studies conference in Sydney in September.Â I’m gonna be there.Â So are a bunch of other bloggers, activists, and academics, like Natalie, Bri, Kath, Francis, Dr Samantha Thomas, and Rachel (who most of you don’t know, and who isn’t strictly fat studies, but she’s asked me to let you all know she’s not evil.Â I’m pretty sure she’s not evil, y’all.)Â Oh yeah, and Charlotte Cooper is the keynote. CHARLOTTE COOPER, YOU GUYS! And the whole shebang is being being run by Samantha Murray, who is one of my long-term intellectual crushes and all round fat-studies academic hero of awesomesauce!

In short, it’s gonna be ACE!Â You should go here for more info about the conference and registration.Â DO IT.

Okay, pilule some catching up to do!Â First up, malady a call for papers for a new fat studies anthology! NEW FAT STUDIES ANTHOLOGY! WOO!

CFP for fat studies edited anthology

Julia McCrossin and I were approached at the PCA/ACA Conference by a publisher and asked to put together a fat studies anthology. The result is the call for papers listed below. Please feel free to distribute far and wide with our thanks.

If you have any questions, please feel free to email either Julia or me. Our addresses are listed below. Huge thanks, and I look forward to hearing from many of you! 🙂

This edited collection seeks to publish recent scholarship that pushes at the boundaries of the existent scholarship on embodiment, from a Fat Studies perspective. As Fat Studies is an emerging field, there are copious amounts of terrain left to map out, and this collection will display the provocatively expansive ways that emergent Fat Studies scholars conceptualize the fat body and the cultural work the fat body does in various times, places, and societies. The purpose of this work includes pushing back at the â€œobesity epidemicâ€ rhetorics in ways that are at once connected to affiliated work in fields like disability studies, queer studies, gender studies (to name a few), and yet uniquely their own. In conclusion, this edited collection will offer crucial new pathways for the generative field of Fat Studies, as well as offer an exciting look at the developing scholars in this field. Perhaps one might say that Fat Studies seeks to integrate within cultural studies and the academy in general a critical body of work on fatness, layering our current understandings of the material body along with metaphoric and/or immaterial ways that fatness saturates our (post) modern world.

Submissions are due August 20, 2010. We welcome traditional and non-traditional formats, including research articles, photographs, poetry, reports of performance art, and others. Articles and papers should range between 15 and 20 double-spaced pages. Please send submissions, along with a brief biographical sketch, directly to jmccross@gwmail.gwu.edu and/or lesleigh.owen@gmail.com.